"I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me"
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A line like this lands as both prayer and indictment: Hughes opens with an oath to God, then immediately admits a kind of enforced blindness. Not personal confusion, but the fog democracy manufactures when it’s promised as a birthright and delivered as a gated club. The genius is in the grammar of exclusion. “Democracy means” sets up a definition, something supposedly stable and civic-minded. What follows is the punchline America hates hearing: “everybody but me.” It’s childish on purpose, the bluntness of someone who’s been told to wait his turn forever. That simplicity turns into a scalpel.
Hughes is writing from the lived contradiction of Black life in the early-to-mid 20th century: a nation that exports democratic mythology while running Jim Crow, suppressing votes, rationing housing, and policing labor. The speaker isn’t debating political theory; he’s testifying to a repeated pattern where equality is always addressed to an imagined “everybody” that doesn’t include him. That “still” matters, too. It implies he’s heard the sermon many times, watched the pageantry, maybe even fought in its wars, and yet the revelation never arrives.
There’s also a sly performance of American reverence. By invoking “the Lord,” Hughes echoes the moral language the country uses to bless itself, then flips it into a complaint that sounds almost too plain to refute. The line makes democracy answer a humiliating question: if it’s real, why does it keep skipping the same people?
Hughes is writing from the lived contradiction of Black life in the early-to-mid 20th century: a nation that exports democratic mythology while running Jim Crow, suppressing votes, rationing housing, and policing labor. The speaker isn’t debating political theory; he’s testifying to a repeated pattern where equality is always addressed to an imagined “everybody” that doesn’t include him. That “still” matters, too. It implies he’s heard the sermon many times, watched the pageantry, maybe even fought in its wars, and yet the revelation never arrives.
There’s also a sly performance of American reverence. By invoking “the Lord,” Hughes echoes the moral language the country uses to bless itself, then flips it into a complaint that sounds almost too plain to refute. The line makes democracy answer a humiliating question: if it’s real, why does it keep skipping the same people?
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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